


Sunspots

by remiges



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Depression, Gen, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Panic Attacks, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 04:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10268747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remiges/pseuds/remiges
Summary: It takes eight days for Bobby's body to be found. It takes less than two for Richard's mother to start coming unraveled.





	

**Day One: Wednesday**

"They should offer a reward," his sister says. She sitting on the couch, just the back of her head visible to Richard. He can't see the expression on her face, but the spoon she's using to stir her coffee chatters against the mug.

The weatherman has given over to the ongoing search for Robert Maimes. Bobby, the newscaster calls him as she brings up a picture that must have been taken during the summer. In it, Bobby's smiling, freckles standing out on his nose, bangs too long and hanging in his eyes. The background has been cropped, but Richard can see the hint of a pool, the splash from a cannonball preserved in time.

He'd had been expecting a school photo, but he supposes the one Bobby's family has is too old. Picture day is next week.

"A reward will just get the crazies to come out of the woodwork," Richard replies after a too-long pause. And then, "Don't let Mom see you drinking that," because he feels obligated, even though she's already downed half of it.

"It's not like my growth can get any more stunted," Cheryl snorts, but she sets the mug on the coffee table anyways. The picture of Bobby changes to a video of search dogs combing through the fields surrounding the old Miller property. "You think they're going to find him?" she asks, tipping her head back to look up at Richard. He holds her gaze for a second, and then focuses back on the hypnotic wave of the tall grasses.

"Yeah," says Richard without taking his eyes off the screen. "Yeah, I do."

He doesn't say anything about how it's already been twenty-four hours, and she doesn't say anything about how their mother still thinks Bobby is going to come back alive.

***

School is an unremarkable blur. There's a hush pressing down in the cafeteria, the classrooms, even the normally boisterous halls. The town is so small that everyone knows _someone_ who knows Bobby, and the ever-expanding ring of connections seems like it should help the investigation, but so far it's yielded nothing.

During lunch, Richard picks at his sandwich and listens absently to Mike complaining about the workload in Mr. Sutherson's class. He wishes there were something he could do. It doesn't look like the police have any leads, and everything feels slightly unhinged because of it, like the lack of closure has sent life spinning just a fraction off course.

When the bell rings, it's too soon and too loud, and Richard can't help but jump.

 

**Day Two: Thursday**

The cutting board is abandoned on the kitchen counter when Richard walks in, the knife marks in the surface brought out by the morning light. His mother is standing in the living room, a foot away from the couch, watching the recap of the investigation. They're playing the same footage from yesterday, the search dogs disappearing in the long grasses. The chatter of the volunteers is a murmur, sound turned down past the point of distinction.

"Mom?" he asks. She's got a knife in one hand and half of an apple in the other. "You want me to finish making breakfast?" She snaps out of it, turning to him and looking down at the apple in her hand like she's not sure how it got there.

"I'm fully capable," she snaps. She makes a move like she's going to go turn off the TV, but in the end doesn't do anything. They stand there like that, watching, until the slice of hazy blue sky above the field cuts away to a news anchor. The woman running the program looks momentarily somber before she cuts into the morning routine.

"Sorry," his mother says. "I'm sorry." Her voice is soft, as soft as the rustling of the grasses had been, and Richard would put his arms around her, but they've never been a physically affectionate family. The gulf between them feels endless and bridgeless.

"Here," she says, passing the apple and the knife off to Richard. "I think I'm going to go lie down for a little bit. The sandwich with peach jam is Cheryl's."

She turns off the TV, but pauses in the dimness at the sight of the mini blinds, forever coming loose at one cord and hanging unevenly. Richard tightens his grip around the apple, the peel lukewarm from the press of his mother's hand, but she doesn't leave the blinds crooked. She messes with them until they're straight again, and only then does she walk out of the room.

Richard lets out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.

Back in the kitchen, he pares the apple down to the core, puts the pieces in a bowl, and pours some cereal. He isn't worried, he tells himself as Cheryl comes out of her room and starts dumping sugar on her cereal. Mom still cares, still has energy. She's probably just tired, he tries to convince himself, and everyone needs a day off sometimes.

They eat in silence, Cheryl slumped in her chair and Richard spooning leftover milk into his mouth. Cheryl crunches on an apple slice, and the sound highlights the silence. The living room clock ticks along, background noise for their meal.

"Where's Mom?" Cheryl asks, her mouth full of apple. "I need her to sign a permission slip."

"Give it to me," Richard says. Cheryl pulls her backpack onto the table, sliding the tablecloth across the surface in an untidy bunch, and the bowl of apples gets dragged along with it. She pulls a piece of paper out of a folder, the corner a creased mess. Richard grabs a pen off the counter and scrawls _Ann Marie Strand_ in looping cursive, then passes it back.

Cheryl looks at it sitting in front of her for a long moment, but all she says is, "You have to date it, too."

When they leave for school, Cheryl straightens the tablecloth with precision, measuring out the lengths of the sides like it really matters if one is a quarter of an inch shorter.

Richard pushes her lunch sack into her hands and herds her outside before she can make them late. He makes sure to lock the door behind them.

 

**Day Three: Friday**

There's a prayer circle before the football game, a counselor coming in to talk with them after the weekend, and a new reward for information.

There's a body, somewhere, Richard thinks, and suddenly he's got a plan.

He'd run into his mother last night when he'd gone to get a drink after using the bathroom. She'd been sitting at the kitchen table with the light off, and Richard had almost missed her in the shadows.

"Mom?" he'd asked after his heart rate had slowed down to a manageable pace.

"I just can't sleep," his mother had said, exhaustion clear in her voice even if he couldn't quite make out her posture. "I keep thinking about that boy. His poor parents." She'd trailed off there, and Richard had felt helpless in the dark, even after he'd managed to get her to go back to bed.

When he gets home from school, his mother is nowhere in sight. There's a blanket crumpled on the couch though, like maybe she'd made it up and decided to take a nap.

Richard pushes the worry down and doesn't go looking for her. Her absence makes it easier to sneak into his father's study.

Standing at the threshold, the air feels cooler than in the other areas of the house, and it smells slightly musty. His father hasn't been home since his trip to Italy turned into Italy-and-Spain, turned into a tour of Europe. His mother has refused to set foot in it since a screaming match that culminated in a dent in the wall from a paperweight. The damage isn't visible from the doorway, but Richard knows it's there.

He cross into the room and closes the door softly, though there's no real reason to. It feels strange to be here, and his footfalls are light as he crosses the rug. He brushes his fingers across the wood of the desk. Real wood, nothing with fake laminate for his father.

There's a custom-made map chest in the corner of the room, each map contained in its own thin drawer. Richard goes over to it and starts tugging them open even though he doesn't know what he's looking for—it's not like his father is particularly interested in Summerville. Not like they'd be here at all if he had his way.

Richard pushes the thought to the side and keeps going. In the third to last drawer, he gets lucky. There's a half-folded map covered in a swirling pattern of lines that must have something to do with geological features, or maybe ley lines. It's for the entire county instead of just Summerville, but the detail is good enough that Richard can use it.

He puts the map to the desk and walks around to the office chair. It's pushed back like someone just got up and left, and when Richard sits down, it feels daring. He rubs his hands across the armrests, the leather cool to his touch, and doesn't try to identify the ugly sensation sitting under his sternum. Instead, he scoots closer and grabs a pencil.

Richard unfolds the map and the paper expands across the desk, curling when it runs into the mug full of pens and the picture frame of Cheryl and him dressed up for Halloween a decade ago.

There's enough light coming in through the window to see, but the ink on the map is faded enough that Richard turns on the lamp. He knows he's just imagining it, but he thinks that the dent in the plaster next to the door has somehow become denser, even though there's enough ambient light that it shouldn't be throwing more of a shadow.

Richard doesn't know why it catches his eye, and he turns back to the desk, spinning his pencil in his fingers. He knows that the paperweight is somewhere, covered by the map, and he digs it out from under the corner bearing the legend.

The paperweight is clear glass with a red flower preserved inside, beautiful and still intact despite its impact with the wall. Richard stares at it for a minute, then opens a drawer in the desk and drops it in with a hollow clunk.

Then, consumed by a burning emotion, he shoves the piles of paperwork off the desk, letting them drift across the floor. They swoop on their way down, landing curled up around each other, and the satisfaction he feels is sharp and vicious. He runs his hands across the map, smoothing it flat, and bends the neck of the lamp closer to his town.

The creases in the paper bisect familiar streets, but the map is old, too old to be very helpful. Richard turns it until the few landmarks he recognizes—the bank and the church on Second Street, the patch of land that was turned into the park—align with his own frame of reference.

He slumps back. The ley lines distort everything, making the roads and streams shift under his gaze. It's like he's looking at a different town. The bedrock is there, just the aesthetics changed, but it's too unfamiliar to do… anything with. Richard almost can't remember what he was trying to do.

But maybe this will be a help instead of a hindrance. Maybe, since the landscape hasn't changed much, he'll be able to see it clearer, see the places without the clutter of people and buildings and the press of modernity. Maybe he'll be able to crawl inside a killer's head, press himself against the back of his eyes, see every place for hiding a small boy. For disposing of a body.

Richard traces light circles around the spots that look likely, sites where the traffic isn't heavy and the land is wild. Somewhere out of the way, Richard thinks, but close enough to be able to transport a body to unseen. If the killer had to walk somewhere with Bobby, they'd have to be strong. Or maybe not. Eleven-year-old boys don't weigh much, really.

The junk yard. Under the old bridge by the mill. In a field. In the woods. At the bottom of a lake. In a basement. The places seem to spin out in an ever-widening circle. The police will find him first, Richard thinks. He doesn't know why he's even doing this.

He's been pressing too hard with his pencil, digging furrows in the paper that he's not going to be able to erase, and circling everything that looks like it could be a dumping ground—like it could be a place that someone could drag Bobby off to and do something terrible. Richard sits back, takes a breath. Another one. Looks at the frantic scribbles covering the map and puts his head between his legs, tries to breathe, traces the patterns of color in the rug with his eyes until he fees less like his lungs are collapsing.

The immensity of the situation sits at the edges of his understanding, waiting for him to realize what he's up against. He's not anyone—isn't the police or the volunteers combing the woods and the fields, the divers in the reservoir. Why does he think that he, Richard Strand, can find Bobby when even the police can't?

The map spread under his hands looks enormous, the scale shifting as he stares at it, and the miles surrounding the city grow until he's sure they encompass the entire world. The pencil marks he'd started putting down seem endless, and Richard doesn't know how he's going to do this.

He hears, muted through the wall of the study, the radio turn on in the living room. The channels flip through classical and rock, and he closes his eyes and prays to a god he doesn't believe in that his mother will stop there, that she'll listen to Peter McCann or Foreigner, blues or jazz or country.

The radio tunes into the foreign news station, and Richard keeps his eyes closed as someone starts speaking Spanish. He knows if he goes out there, she'll be sitting on the couch, maybe lying on it, staring into the distance as she listens to someone speak a language she doesn't understand.

Richard takes a breath. Then he exchanges his pencil for a pen and draws a dot at the likeliest place Bobby might have been grabbed.

Bobby used to tag along with Wayne's brother when they walked to the middle school together. The high school sits in the opposite direction, but Richard still remembers the route, can almost feel the impact of pavement under his feet. He starts there, draws paths to the shortcut through the alley and the drainage ditches that abut the park. He doesn't think about how useless this is going to be if the killer hadn't been on foot.

Out in the living room, the radio keeps emitting a language no one in the family can comprehend, and Richard draws and draws and draws.

 

**Day Four: Saturday**

Their mother had been complaining about her headache in a frayed voice, so Richard takes Cheryl bowling. It's the only thing to do in town that isn't hang out at the store or smoke in the garden area behind the war memorial.

As they're walking over, Richard catches sight of one of the missing posters with Bobby's face on it, the paper shivering against the phone pole it's stapled to, and his mood drops. His legs ache from all the biking he's been doing. He's made it around town to the likeliest places he'd marked on the map and found nothing.

The problem, he thinks as he pays for their shoe rentals, is that it's just so much land. It won't matter if Bobby has been dumped in the middle of a field somewhere and Richard searches it but crosses the site off the map before he manages to exhaust every inch.

What he needs is a way to narrow down the likeliest sites. What he needs are better maps, ones that are actually focused on Summerville and weren't made sometime last century.

"Ha!" Cheryl crows as she bowls a strike, shoving his shoulder. "Beat that."

Richard grabs a ball out of the rack and hefts it in his hand before he lines up his shot. Just before he lets go, the thought hits him—the library. The archive room.

A thread of disgust at his own ineptitude runs through him, but it's too late to beat himself up now. The library is only open on weekdays, but just having a plan makes him feel more in control.

As the ball curls down the lane and rolls into the gutter with a decisive clunk a quarter of the way from the pins, and his sister laughs like a loon, Richard smiles for the first time in days.

 

**Day Five: Sunday**

He spends the morning doing chores around the house—vacuuming, washing the dishes that have piled up, clearing the clutter accumulated on the coffee table. Cheryl is gone at a tournament, but he doesn't mind doing it by himself. It helps sometimes, when his mother gets like this. And if she doesn't notice, than at least Richard is grateful for the way it gives him something concrete to do.

He eat leftovers for lunch and puts together a plate for his mother to heat up when she gets back from church, then heads to the store.

He's trying to remember what was on the list he'd left on the counter, when someone calls, "Dickey?" Richard puts down the can of spam he'd been holding and turns around. Mrs. Hayworth comes over to him, one of the wheels on her cart making a squeaky thumping noise as she pushes it.

"I thought that was you," she says. "And how is your mother? I was going to bring some soup over, but then with all the news I just haven't had time. Poor thing," she continues without giving Richard a chance to fill the gap. "I'll bring over chicken noodle if I have time later. I do hope she gets better soon. And will we be seeing you next Sunday?" she asks, her tone verging on reproachful. She eyes the contents of Richard's cart, like she's doubts he's feeding his mother well enough.

Richard feels like the conversation has already gotten away from him, and he hasn't even managed to get a word in yet. "She wasn't at church?" Richard asks, and he can feel a chill moving across his skin. His mother never misses unless it's a bad one.

"No," Mrs. Hayworth says, starting to look puzzled. "Didn't you know that? Said she felt like she was coming down with something during women's group. Are you sure you're all right?"

"Fine," Richard replies absently, and excuses himself as quickly as he can, dumping the spam into the cart and heading for the checkout line.

Back home, his mother is sitting at the kitchen table, and Richard feels momentarily stupid for rushing back, like something was going to happen if he wasn't there. He dumps the groceries on the table and starts putting them away.

"I ran into Mrs. Hayworth at the store," Richard says as he sticks a box of crackers in the cabinet. "She said she missed you today."

His mother hums something noncommittal. "Missing church isn't the end of the world," she says, and Richard tries not to compare her voice to how she usually sounds, bright and energetic instead of lethargic. If she hadn't been at church, that meant she'd still been in bed when he'd been cleaning, and she shouldn't sound as exhausted as she does.

He notices that there aren't any new dishes in the sink, and opens the refrigerator with a sense of dread. The lunch he'd put together for her is still under tin foil on the middle shelf.

Richard has a sudden, overwhelming urge to start crying, or maybe shake his mother until she gives a damn again, but he knows that it won't help. He aches deep inside his ribcage, and he closes the refrigerator door so carefully that the rubber seal almost don't catch, and steels himself to try and get her to eat something.

 

**Day Six: Monday**

When Richard unlocks the front door, the first thing he notices is how dark it is inside. He'd opened the blinds in the kitchen when he and Cheryl were leaving for school, but the ones in the living room are still closed—all of them, not just the one on the left that's always coming loose.

"Mom?" he calls, and there's a fragile, beating hope in his chest that she's gone to see friends or catch up with a different worship group, but the silence isn't reassuring. Cheryl is looking at him with wide eyes, and he gestures for her to stay in the living room.

He puts his backpack down on the couch and walks over to his parent's room, hesitating with his hand on the knob before he twists it and enters. Inside, there's a lump on the bed covered by sheets.

"Mom?" Richard says again, and hates the way his voice shakes.

The lump doesn't move. He creeps closer, and sees that his mother's eyes are open, staring blankly at the wall and blinking occasionally.

"What," she says after a long pause, like even this is too much effort.

"Have you eaten?" he asks, still hovering a couple of feet away. He wishes he could bridge the gap, but there's something keeping him planted here, scared to get too close in case that's the thing that cracks her.

"Not hungry," she murmurs, rolling over so all Richard can see is the curve of her back.

"Okay, but you have to eat something," he says. She doesn't respond. "Or, at least try. Please," he adds, and she doesn't shift, just stayed curled into a too-small shape under the covers.

"Okay," he says again, quieter this time. "I'm going to get Cheryl to make you something. You'll feel better when you eat." He knows it's a lie as soon as he says it, but there's nothing else he can do. He leave the bedroom door open a crack when he walks out, and meets Cheryl's gaze.

She'd migrated closer to the bedroom door when he'd been talking, and Richard can't even be mad that she hadn't stayed in the living room, because that means he doesn't have to explain anything. She nods, a mute understanding passing between them, and Richard walks though the dark house and out into the sunshine.

Being outside feels like a shock, like the rest of the world should have gone dim like the inside of their house, like the hole his mother has fallen into. There are birds singing, though, and the sun is weak but there, resolute in a sky filled with clouds.

Richard doesn't have his father's map on him, but he's not going looking for Bobby in fields or patches of woods right now. He grabs his bike and sets out, pedaling too fast with his hands squeezed tight enough around the handlebars that he can feel the bite of plastic, and the streets blur into houses and trees and endless sky.

***

There's a rack of newspapers immediately to his left inside the library, and the headline screams, "Hunt for Local Boy Continues" in thick black letters.

Richard has a sense memory of going to the library to read up on the string of killings in the news last year. His mother had read the stories with her hand over her mouth, like she could catch the horror and keep it, stuff it back inside so it couldn't harm anyone but herself.

Richard turns away from the papers before he can do something stupid like kick the rack over, and heads for the maps section. His father had been gone for that part of the year too, now that he thinks about it. He'd been somewhere in Europe, or maybe Africa, looking at something rare and beautiful while the rest of them tried to reconcile the fact that humanity was capable of doing terrible things.

Richard clenches his hands into fists and gives a tight nod to Mabel, who's doing something with a stack of returns. He takes the stairs to the lower floor two at a time.

The library has plat maps, lines delineating who own what land, and the pages pan in and out as Richard turns them. He can't write in these, not and hope to get away with it, but he has the sticky notes he took from his father's desk. He arrays them in neat squares over the sites that look likely. He'll write them down before he leaves and hope that he can find them without a visual aid.

"You can check those out, you know," says Mabel as she passes him again after he's been there for a while. "They don't check out for as long as regular books, but they do check out. School project?" she asks, and Richard says yes because it's easier than saying that he's looking for a body in a grave that hasn't been discovered yet.

He doesn't say anything about his mother. It's a non-sequitur, he knows. Richard has some idea that it's the not knowing that she can't stand—whether Bobby's dead or alive, healthy or not. Whether his parents will be able to bury his body or if it will be left rotting in the wilderness or stuffed in some freak's freezer. If his mother just had something solid to hold on to when the gray came for her, surely that would help. Surely.

He takes the plat maps back upstairs, and Mabel follows so she can check him out.

"These will be due back the 25th of September," she says once all the slips have been stamped. "And don't stay out too late, you hear me? Terrible things." She pushes the maps towards him and shakes her head. "Terrible things."

***

His mother is still in bed when Richard gets home, but Cheryl is sitting with her. There's most of a sandwich sitting on a plate on the nightstand, and Cheryl grimaces when she sees him looking.

She comes to the doorway and whispers, "I got her to eat a little, but she's not good. Are you going to—" she starts, and Richard nods without needing to hear the remainder of the sentence.

He leaves her in the darkness of their mother's room, takes the plat books to the study and arranges them on the floor. Only then does he pick up the phone to do what he's been dreading since the news broke about Bobby and the cracks started to show.

The phone almost rings out before it's picked up.

"Strand," his father says, and Richard closes his eyes.

"It's Mom," Richard says. "She's sick." There's a pause on the other end of the line.

"Actually sick or just can't be bothered to get out of bed," his father asks. Even a continent away, Richard can hear the derision. "Tell her to quit lazing around. The rest of the world manages to get through the day without falling apart. I'll be home when I'm done with this expedition."

"She needs help," Richard says, and he hates the way his voice shakes, the weakness it betrays. "I think it's going to be a bad one. Last time the doctors said—"

"Richard," his father interrupts. There's warning in his voice, but Richard's been on a growth spurt, and there are miles and miles separating them, an entire ocean between his body and his father's rage.

He hangs up without waiting for the rest of the sentence. His father doesn't call back.

 

**Day Seven: Tuesday**

Richard skips school the next day, takes his bike and visits some of the sites he'd marked in the plat books. He'd torn a page out of one, and he holds it awkwardly in front of him as he pedals, twisting the paper around so it matches up with the streets.

He doesn't think about future consequences—this is more important.

Richard crisscrosses the town again and again, walks the hollows and the fields, but by the time the light runs out, he's still got nothing. The world is too large for one small boy, and he can't help himself from hating Bobby Maimes for being dead and for what he's doing to the community, to his mother. The feeling curdles inside him until it he feels physically nauseous and has to pull his bike to a stop by the side of a creek.

He dismounts and staggers to his knees, lets the bike tumble over on its side, and sits there at the edge of the weeds watching the water weave past. He chokes on his anger until it melds into tears, this suffocating feeling pulsing hot and uncomfortable in his chest.

He wishes as dusk closes in, wishes desperately, that Bobby Maimes had never been born, and hates himself for the thought. The sky finally tips over into night, and when the mosquitoes become too bad to remain any longer, Richard finally picks himself up and heads back home, wheeling his bike as he goes.

Cheryl is sitting in the kitchen working on homework when he comes in, and she looks worried.

"Is she…" Richard starts, and his sister shakes her head.

"I left her some crackers and she ate them, but…" she trails off, voice hushed like she's afraid of disturbing whatever has its claws in their mother. "Should we… should we take away things she could hurt herself with?" she asks, and her voice shakes.

The light from the overhead feels like it's crushing Richard. "Maybe," he hears himself say. "Maybe." He drags himself to the refrigerator to get out the last of the leftovers to heat up, and just stands there for a too long moment, like if he just picks the right food to try and coax his mother into eating, she'll get out of bed. She'll stop staring at the wall. She'll get better.

"You okay?" Cheryl asks him, and he just nods, fighting the gravity that feels like it's trying to consume him.

***

Richard is standing just past the Haggs' land. The air is vivid, if vivid is a color, is a feeling, is the taste of blood running under his skin. The trees loom on the edge of his vision, and the sensation of being under them, of being consumed, feels inevitable. Richard can sense it in his bones, somehow, ribs creaking from the weight.

The scent of loam and dead leaves, corn getting closer to the harvest, is intimate. Everything feels so crisp he thinks he could wrap his fingers around it and take it with him. It's all suddenly easy, and Richard walks like he knows where he's going, like he's known it his entire life.

He stops by the edge of a creek after an eternity or a few minutes. Standing in front of him, haloed in gold and in purpose, is a boy. He's wearing a green jumper and sneakers, and his hair curls over his eyes in bangs that are just too long to be fashionable. There's a smattering of freckles preserved in his skin, even though summer has no meaning here.

The boy raises his arm from where it'd been hanging at his side. He points, and Richard tastes cornhusks, dried and crunching, feels the birdsong cradling him, and the boy—Bobby, Richard would know it was Bobby even if he'd never seen him before, even if Bobby hadn't existed before this moment—looks at him.

There's a profound sense of certainty that surges through Richard, the air around him humming with it. The water moves on past the bank and the cowbirds cry their mewling laugh and Bobby points and the universe revolves around him.

Richard knows how vision work. The image is flipped by the lens before it's processed by the brain, so everyone is navigating a world that's actually upside down. This moment, Richard thinks, is like taking away the lens, flipping the images right-side up until everything slots into place for the first time.

Richard breathes in the scent from the creek and doesn't open his mouth to question because that's not what he'd here for. Bobby points and Richard stands and the leaves rustle and the birds sing and the ground is so firm it'll never disintegrate.

And then he wakes up.

 

**Day Eight: Wednesday**

The sheets feel strange, and the angle of the light falling in through the window is wrong, somehow. It takes Richard a moment to realize that he's awake, and even then he can't seem to settle in his skin. He tries to capture the last of the dream, but it's slipping through his mind. He just has a sense memory of green and certainty and Bobby's face with someone else's eyes staring out at him.

The light hits his desk and spreads shadows across the floor that look more like holes in the fabric of the universe, and Richard makes sure to avoid them as he gets dressed.

The combination of clothes he puts on isn't right and they don't fit like they're supposed to, but he can't find the ones that _are_ right. The world is wrong in small, inconceivable ways that he can't name, and Richard feels oddly like he stared at the sun for too long and is trying to see past sunspots left on his vision.

He gives up, takes his unnatural body downstairs and puts his wrong homework into his wrong backpack and starts making a wrong sack lunch. He knows that outside the trees are swaying, air is moving, life is continuing, but still nothing snaps into place.

He watches as his sister makes a pot of coffee that she shouldn't be drinking, and can't figure out how to form words. The door to their mother's room is still shut, and the world wobbles. Richard blinks, blinks again, and tries to wake up, despite knowing that he already has.

***

Richard doesn't remember much about school that day, just that all the colors are too saturated and faded, all at once. He ends up in the wrong class twice, and finally just locks himself in a bathroom stall, trying not to breath too deeply, and counts the tiles on the floor until it feels less like he's going to fly apart.

When the bell rings, he feels solid enough again to go to lunch.

"Dickey," Mike say. "Yo, Dickey. Richard." Richard raises his head from where he'd been studying his sandwich without taking a bite.

"What," he says. The light is too artificial in here, but at least it's not as bad as it was when he'd first woken up.

"That project, man. You were going to come over to help, remember?"

Richard does remember, vaguely. He thinks about his mother all alone in her room, what she could be doing and what he needs to do to take care of her, but it's just too much. Richard has never claimed to be strong, and this will give him a couple of hours outside of the house and the living room with its perpetually crooked mini blinds because his mother doesn't have the energy to take care of herself, let alone anything else.

"Sure," he hears himself say, and the rest of the day goes back to it's blurred haze of unreality, until finally he's standing outside Mike's house with no real memory of the trip there.

He leaves his bike in the side yard and knocks. Mike's mother opens the door, smile the smile of the perpetually harried, and ushers him to the living room where Mike has a poster spread out across the floor. Wesley and Dave are goofing off with the markers, trying to draw on each other's arms and mostly succeeding.

"Oh good," Mike says. "About time. I thought if we got this done quickly, we could—" but Richard doesn't catch the rest of the sentence. It feels like the sound has turned off suddenly, and his attention is caught on the TV where Wesley's little brother has been flipping through the channels.

On screen is Bobby, the same picture the news has been using for all of its coverage. Looking at it, something cracks open in Richard's head

The edge of sky that hasn't been cropped out is the same shade of blue he'd seen in his dream, a blue so vivid it feels like a physical thing. The rest of the world around him grays out slightly, and it feels like Richard has just woken up, the haze of the day disintegrating back into reality.

Richard walks to the door that leads out to the porch, and ignores Mike asking him what he's doing. He stands there for one endless moment, then steps across the threshold. In the distance a hound starts baying, and he can taste the change on the air, feel it in the cool of the afternoon.

"I know where Bobby is," he hears himself say, and somehow it's true.

The next few minutes pass in a rush, full of questions that he can't answer, and soon his friends are all out the door, poster abandoned in the living room in favor of adventure.

Richard knows they're just humoring him, but the road is straight under the tires of his bike. He knows where he's going, even if his view is blocked by Wesley, riding on his handlebars because he didn't want to be left behind.

Richard guides them, or he should say the thing inside him guides them, to the strip of woods that serves as a marker between two properties. He abandons his bike and walks towards it without hesitating, and everyone follows him.

It's not quite dim in the woods yet, but there are shadows creeping across the grass. They don't walk for very long before the trees start to thin. The chatter dies away, like the rest of the group can sense what Richard is feeling, the inexorable pull of this place.

Richard ignores the chill crawling up his spine and walks. Up ahead there's a clearing, and in the clearing there's a stream, and by the stream… by the stream…

He's wearing the same clothes as he was in the dream.

The chill lodges at the base of Richard's throat. They should have smelled him, but he guesses it's not like the movies, or maybe the wind was blowing the wrong way, because he can't smell anything. He knows Bobby just looks familiar because Richard knows Bobby, is remembering the description of his clothes from the news.

It takes him a second to realize that he can't remember anyone knowing what Bobby was wearing when he went missing.

Richard hears retching behind him, and suddenly the fog he'd been in is broken. The next thing he knows, he's stumbling back and dropping to his knees, gagging until he vomits, the half-digested sandwich he'd eaten for lunch coming up through his nose, and he can't _breathe_.

He's shaking, and that's Bobby, Bobby Maimes, lying discarded a couple dozen feet away, and Richard realizes in a sudden, clear vision, that this isn't going to change anything. Not going to bring Bobby back or his mother back, not even with the closure. Bobby's parents, he thinks to himself. This will give them something, at least, but the thought is slippery, twisting out of his mind, his selfish thoughts, his self-absorption.

As if from a far off distance, he hears Wayne saying something about getting the police, and he chokes again. He glances up, and the sky has reverted back to its normal shade. He looks over at Bobby, covered by a thin layer of leaves, not even buried properly, and thinks for one shockingly sharp moment that this must be what evil looks like, and then can't think at all past the stench of decay and the incessant buzzing of the flies.

 

**Day ???: ???**

A couple decades removed from the investigation and all the accusations that followed, Richard finds himself in the woods again.

He's not looking for a body, except he is, except that that would mean he's wishing for his wife to be dead, except—

Except—

Time has slipped sideways somewhere between being with Coralee and losing her, and Richard gets what his mother had been dealing with all those years back. He can't stand the not knowing, the way the world doesn't make any sense once people fall out of position and aren't where they're supposed to be.

He scans the leaves, looking for scraps of clothing or broken branches, footprints, anything. He can't help but hope that Coralee is alive, but when he ends up on his knees on the hard ground, the cool seeping through the fabric of his pants, all he can think of is death.

He just needs to find her. And maybe he's years removed from the boy he was when Bobby went missing, but he's still the same person. Richard closes his eyes.

He prays, or maybe wishes, but he bargains like his life depends on it. He calls to every god, every creature that could be listening, promises anything if they'll guide him to her.

Richard's found someone before, and it can't have just been chance or luck that he knew how to fumble his way across the terrain of Summerville to Bobby's body. It can't have been an accident, because if it was there's no hope for Coralee. It was something more, he knows it, some higher power working through him, and Richard bows his spine, presses his cheek against the bumpy ground, and begs.

His heart's going crazy and he can't feel his fingers. He's hyperventilating, but there's not enough air to draw a breath. When the world finally fades out, Richard sees darkness and a boy in green with no face tracing a path through the woods, but no matter how fast he runs, he can never catch up.

He wakes, or maybe regains consciousness, and he's still just himself, just Richard Strand, a man with a missing wife and nothing more. He sits in the woods, so different than the one's he'd walked through to find Bobby Maimes all those years ago, and watches the shadows spill across the ground.

Richard thinks that, for the first time, he understands the enormity of the weight his mother had been carrying, and can't fault her for being crushed by it.

And then, after a limitless space of time and grief and loneliness and fear, sitting on the cold ground with leaf detritus itching against his skin, Richard gets up. He thinks back to the grid patterns he'd made on maps as he tried to close in on the body of a small boy in a large world. There's no one here but him, and no help coming.

Richard takes a breath and thinks about Coralee and her smile, her laughter, her cutting sarcasm and terrible casseroles and the way her skin smells. He thinks about the spaces most likely to hold the body of the woman he loves. He picks the direction he thinks will take him deeper into the woods, and finally, finally, he starts walking.

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out with me on [tumblr!](https://enter-remiges.tumblr.com/)


End file.
